In his excellent book, “The Future of Marriage,” David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, reasserts every child’s birthright to live with their married mother and father. This obvious need for institutionalizing marriage, he says, has been lost in the smoke and mirrors of the “gay marriage” debate.

Asking what is marriage and why does it matter, Blankenhorn quotes philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, brain scientists and other scholars who agree “marriage” is less about “love” than it is about a couple’s commitment to nurture and protect their potential children into adulthood.

Blankenhorn cites anthropological marriage studies as far flung as ancient Mesopotamia and the Trobriand Islands as well as “gay and lesbian movement” scholars and activists who speak for “gay marriage,” “gay adoption,” group marriage, polyamory, polygamy and other “flexible” marriage schemes.

Still, the data show that children’s right to both a mother and a father “should outweigh new adult freedoms,” including “same-sex marriage.”

Chastity before and fidelity within marriage has assured the safest, healthiest arrangement for children’s welfare. Changing the meaning of marriage, says Blankenhorn, changes the meaning of “parents” and of our economic, educational, legal and health care systems.

In his effort to reach out to a wider public, Blankenhorn skims past his finding that the only culturally approved male-male marriages appear in cultures that permit adult males to marry boys.

Yet this is quite a finding for today’s “gay marriage” debate!

Blankenhorn did not say such “boy marriages” reveal the existence of pederastic patriarchies. However, clearly in cultures where the value of women is trivialized, men have historically sought to sexually exploit youths, and quite often young boys.

Although Blankenhorn’s “The Future of Marriage” pre-history and global data fascinate, he largely ignores how American sexual history led to our marital crisis.

Homosexual advocate Andrew Sullivan’s quote in “The Future of Marriage” comes closest to what’s missing from the book. Sullivan says, “If you want to return straight marriage to the 1950s, go ahead,” but “until you do, there can be no valid objection to gay marriage.”

Blankenhorn suggests Sullivan “is apparently referring mainly to rates of divorce and unwed childbearing, which indeed were much lower in the 1950s.”

Well then, what changed “straight marriage”? What increased American rates of divorce and unwed childbearing after the 1950s?

Those battling the “marriage” issue cannot progress in their efforts, in my view, until they deal with “the sexual revolution.”

In 1948 and 1953, Americans still were reeling from Alfred Kinsey’s two fraudulent sex books on males and females when they were hit broadside in December 1953 by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine.

Hefner has it right, too. He says as “Kinsey’s pamphleteer” these two men were the catalysts for the sexual revolution.

The Hefner cult condemned chastity, fidelity and monogamous marriage and championed adultery, sodomy, orgies, lesbianism, no-fault divorce, abortion on demand and the like; at the same time the Kinsey cult was carving out anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-women and anti-child laws and legislation.

Kinsey/Hefner cultists are far more relevant to American marital dissolution than the mating patterns of Trobriand Islanders.

Kinsey’s scientific frauds, quoted by the U.S. Supreme Curt and Ivy League textbooks, have percolated down to high schools, middle schools and kindergarteners. Hefner’s gateway porn showed Joe College how to dump marriage, fidelity and fatherhood to become a lifetime member of the dazed, sexually addicted playboy consumer world.

Major educational, legal and media change agents deliberately undermined American marriage and the civil society post-1950 – as is fully documented in my latest book, “Kinsey, Crimes & Consequences.” Regrettably, in my view, until sex science fraud and mainstream pornography are publicly indicted and legislatively exposed, marriage and society will remain on the endangered species list.